Multi-shanks SiNAPS Active Pixel Sensor CMOS probe: 1024 simultaneously recording channels for high-density intracortical brain mapping

The advent of implantable active dense CMOS neural probes opened a new era for electrophysiology in neuroscience. These single shank electrode arrays, and the emerging tailored analysis tools, provide for the first time to neuroscientists the neurotechnology means to spatiotemporally resolve the activity of hundreds of different single-neurons in multiple vertically aligned brain structures. However, while these unprecedented experimental capabilities to study columnar brain properties are a big leap forward in neuroscience, there is the need to spatially distribute electrodes also horizontally. Closely spacing and consistently placing in well-defined geometrical arrangement multiple isolated single-shank probes is methodologically and economically impractical. Here, we present the first high-density CMOS neural probe with multiple shanks integrating thousand’s of closely spaced and simultaneously recording microelectrodes to map neural activity across 2D lattice. Taking advantage from the high-modularity of our electrode-pixels-based SiNAPS technology, we realized a four shanks active dense probe with 256 electrode-pixels/shank and a pitch of 28 m, for a total of 1024 simultaneously recording channels. The achieved performances allow for full-band, whole-array read-outs at 25 kHz/channel, show a measured input referred noise in the action potential band (300-7000 Hz) of 6.5 ± 2.1V, and a power consumption <6 W/electrode-pixel. Preliminary recordings in awake behaving mice demonstrated the capability of multi-shanks SiNAPS probes to simultaneously record neural activity (both LFPs and spikes) from a brain area >6 mm, spanning cortical, hippocampal and thalamic regions. High-density 2D array enables combining large population unit recording across distributed networks with precise intra- and interlaminar/nuclear mapping of the oscillatory dynamics. These results pave the way to a new generation of high-density and extremely compact multi-shanks CMOS-probes with tunable layouts for electrophysiological mapping of brain activity at the single-neurons resolution.